Last year I was sat on a curb by the side of the road waiting for the Olympic torch to go past. While I waited I sent a tweet, texted my mum and checked my email. There was a new email in my inbox, so I opened it and read it. And then I burst out laughing.

The email was from my publisher saying that they liked the sample pages and the outline of the book I’d proposed and wanted to put it out for the new year. Could I deliver it by the autumn. My honest answer would have been no.

Other than the first few chapters and the outline, I hadn’t written much of the book. I was about 30,000 words and a lot of editing away from it being finished. But I did what any sane person would have done in this situation, I replied to say “Yes, of course. No problem.”

That summer my time was split between going to work, watching the Olympics, training for a marathon and writing The Lazy Runner. I made a lot of progress with all four of those things – and then I got burgled and my laptop was stolen.

Although I had my words backed up on a memory stick and saved in the cloud, I now had no laptop on which to carry on writing. So I stayed late at work to use my work PC, pitched up camp at a friend’s house at weekends and used their Mac, made friends with the printers over the road from my office who printed out my manuscript several times so I could do my edits in red pen at home to save time when I finally did get in front of a screen. Generally I did what I needed to get it done.

It was hard work writing the book. There was a lot of self-doubt about whether people would be interested in it, whether I would get to the end and questioning about what the point of doing it was. To reinforce the point that Murakami makes about the similarities between distance running and creative writing – it was a bit like training for a marathon. It’s difficult but essentially you’re doing it because you enjoy it.

It’s a year since The Lazy Runner came out and since then there’s not been a week when I haven’t had a tweet or an email from someone reading it just wanting to say hello and that they’re enjoying it. It’s been a bit surreal.

Without that seemingly unattainable deadline looming I maybe wouldn’t have finished writing my book. So last year, above all else, what I learnt is this: whatever your goals or dreams are, give yourself a deadline and get shit done. And when things get in your way, go round them.

Oh, and (as the picture above shows) when you try to do all the things at once on a very tight deadline, washing your hair goes out the window.

If you haven’t read it yet, The Lazy Runner is available on Amazon, and the iBooks store as well as the Kobo store and anywhere else you might buy your ebooks from.